SMU artist wins photography award

Excerpt

The following story ran in the July 19, 2012, edition of the White Rock Lake Weekly. Kael Alford is an adjunct assistant professor and 2012-13 visiting artist in photography in the Division of Art at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts.

July 31, 2012

By Victoria Winkelman

Kael Alford, adjunct assistant professor and 2012-13 visiting artist in photography in the Division of Art at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, has been named the winner of the 2012 Michael P. Smith Fund For Documentary Photography Award. The $5,000 award is presented annually by the New Orleans Photo Alliance to a Gulf Coast photographer whose work “combines artistic excellence and a sustained commitment to a long-term cultural documentary project.”

Alford’s award will support her current work focusing on a remote community in the disappearing wetlands of Louisiana’s coast, where her grandmother was born and which is home to the Native American communities of which Alford is a descendant. She is conducting a multi-year documentary project to record the rapidly vanishing cultural and physical landscape of the region, which has been damaged by gas and oil extraction and battered by storms and spills....